me + my boys: February 2011

Friday, February 25, 2011

look what i can do!

i can roll over!! all by myself! you can't make me stay on my tummy anymore!

i can grab my toes! and anything else i can get my tiny paws on.

five months have gone by so so so fast.

i feel like a broken record, but seriously, how on earth is cole so big already? i can't believe it. i love watching him grow up, but it breaks my heart at the same time. my baby is disappearing! he is so incredibly sweet and easy to love. i would just sit and snuggle him all day if i could. if i didn't have ben begging me to go play i would probably hold cole all through his naps. every time he wakes up he is bigger! he is starting to test out solids and it is hilarious. i hate to admit that his first solid was not the prescribed rice cereal, but a french fry. and guess what? he loved it. he kept grabbing my hand to shove it back in his mouth!

trying to take pictures . . .

as soon as i get cole all set up to take some pictures . . .

ben jumps in. but he doesn't want me to take pictures of him. he just likes to prevent me from taking pictures of cole.

good morning!

it is next to impossible to take a "nice" picture of my boys together. the picture above illustrates this point perfectly. ben's sippy cup is practically fused to his arm and cole is constantly trying to grab it.

at least they love each other . . .

until ben starts kicking cole in the face.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

my hero

well, of course ben came and crawled in bed with scott and i, for the millionth time. and of course he woke up when cole woke up to eat at five am. why wouldn't he. he also had to sit right next to me while i fed and rocked cole just to make sure i could hear he constant pleading to "put cole-y away in his crib" and come lay by him. so it took me forever to get cole settled down because he kept hearing ben and wanting to play.
when we finally made it back to my bed. scott was just getting ready to leave for work. he came over to give us kisses before he left. as he bent over ben, ben put his arm over me and said, "i take care of mommy. i her super hero. i take care a her daddy." i melted and all previous offenses were forgotten.

Friday, February 11, 2011

sick, sick, sick

did we fall off the planet? no. we have all been sick. so sick. it is no fun to be a mommy with a horrific head cold and migraines trying to take care of two cranky sick boys with colds. luckily, i think we are on the upside of things. poor little cole has had the worst of it which has been really hard. ben never got sick when he was a baby. so this is the first time i have had a sick infant. it kinda freaked me out. hopefully, once i get some sleep, (the last three nights in a row the longest stretch of sleep i have had has been 2.5 hours. awesome.), i can return to a normal human being and have enough brain power to take a photo or do a blog post.

tanner update

Tanner did it! Tanner went into open heart surgery and came out of it a rockstar! Everything went smoothly. Now we just need him to heal quickly so he can come home and get loved to pieces by all of us!

Here is Grandpa Wayne's breakdown of what happened:
The surgeon was able to repair his heart in the way that it will function normally anatomically. In otherwords, they removed the narrow part of the aorta, they rebuilt the aortic arch to make it normal sized, they patched the two holes in the heart, and they were able to push the sub valvular stenosis aside without having to surgically remove it. They do an ultrasound after surgery to check things out and the surgeon reported there was no obstruction. So we are very grateful for good news. Ali and Kollin have felt it has pretty much been one piece of bad news after another to this point.

As we sat here today and just thought about all the people in the world thinking of an praying for Tanner, it was kind of overwhelming. We are grateful for that support. There is no question that it opens conduits from Heaven to assist in things like this. We are so grateful for this result and know there are miracles involved here. We hope there will not be too many ups and downs ahead but know there may be. But today is good so we will take that.

Ali has also started a blog about Tanner. Click here to see pictures and more updates.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

pray for tanner

Our sweet little cousin was born on February 3, 2011. He is so so so darling with a full head of beautiful thick hair. He was getting ready to go home today with his mommy and daddy (Ali and Kollin) when they discovered he had a heart coarctation. He is now in the cardiac ICU at Primary Children's Hospital. When they checked him out this evening they found a couple other problems with his little heart. He will definitely be having open heart surgery sometime next week. Please, please keep Tanner and Ali and Kollin in your prayers.

We love you guys!

Here is Grandpa Wayne's description of Tanner's condition:

Tanner is settled in at PCMC. The tests all show that he has good circulation and his body is getting enough oxygen and nutrients. He is stable. He is in much better shape than most babies with this condition when they arrive at the hospital.

There are new concerns. It turns out there are 4 problems besides the coarctation that could not be determined with the less precise equipment used at a regular hospital. He is in the cardiac ICU at PCMC. He has a good cardiologist and intensivist.

The new concerns are 1) the whole aortic arch is a little too narrow. It will all need to be repaired by placing a graft to make it larger, 2 and 3) The hole in the lower chamber of the heart is quite a bit larger than expected. This has problems of its own. But also with a hole there part of the septum (the wall in the heart) has been like a window drape, kind of hanging free in the flow of the blood and has blocked the aortic valve. As a result, or maybe totally unrelated, the aortic valve is too small. It looks healthy, but there is concern if the aortic valve is large enough to handle all the blood flow from the left ventricle. If they do the repair and it is to small he will go into heart failure and need another major surgery. It is borderline and thus they are weighing whether to risk fixing him or doing a less helpful temporary surgery and then a follow up in 6 months. Anyway, the hole (called VSD) will have to be repaired at the time of surgery. This means that Tanner will not only require a repair on his aorta, but an incision in his heart (open heart surgery) to repair the hole, and pull the septum out of the way 4) The hole in the upper chamber is large enough they may have fix that at the same time.

The experts will be discussing this over the next couple of days what they will do and when. So there you go.

Friday, February 4, 2011

scripture stories . . .

one of my new year's resolution is to be more active about bringing the gospel into my home and teaching my children. during general conference in april 2010 elder eyring said, "Our most important and powerful assignments are in the family. They are important because the family has the opportunity at the start of a child’s life to put feet firmly on the path home. Parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles are made more powerful guides and rescuers by the bonds of love that are the very nature of a family. The family has an advantage in the first eight years of a child’s life. In those protected years, because of the Atonement of Jesus Christ, Satan’s use of the mists of darkness to hide the path to return home is blocked." i realized that i only have eight precious years to build up a spiritual foundation for my children without satan's interference. ben is three in one month! i need to get serious about teaching them. time is sadly running out. so we have been trying really hard to do family home evening and scripture reading. i think i am getting through . . . maybe . . .

ben's favorite story is the crucifixion because there is a picture of a "big" storm with huge lightning bolts. he says, "there is a big storm, jesus (which sounds a lot like jason) went away and everybody got sad." then he flips the page and says, "then he came back and made everyone happy!" i think i can say he understands the resurrection on the most basic of levels, but i think the storm is still much more interesting.

we read the story of jared the other night. i explained that jared asked heavenly father to touch the stones so they would shine and then they could see inside their dark ships. ben looked at his index finger for a few seconds and then looked up at me and said, "look mommy, touch it!' so i touched his finger and he said, "see its a flashlight!"

oh well, at least we are trying.